


Could Be a House of Cards

by Daisiestdaisy (Doyle)



Category: Arrested Development
Genre: Gen, Love Confessions, M/M, Minor Character(s), offscreen relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-23
Updated: 2015-06-23
Packaged: 2018-04-05 20:46:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4194360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Doyle/pseuds/Daisiestdaisy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Months after Cinco, Tony finally gets around to telling Sally what he's been doing. Also who.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Could Be a House of Cards

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lydiduh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lydiduh/gifts).



> This has been languishing on my hard drive for a year and a half. Periodic attempts to actually bring GOB onscreen at the end failed hard. So - 5000 words of two minor characters talking in a diner it is!

Sally slid into the opposite side of the booth and said, “Twenty minutes, Tony. I’m opening the church and state fair at one. And I told you months ago that we weren’t doing this any more.”

“Uh, _hi_ ,” he said, and “if I was calling for a nooner I think I’d’ve made you pick somewhere a little classier than a Klimpy’s,” and not that it mattered but _he_ had told _her_ that they had to stop hooking up first. Simultaneously. Whatever.

“Get your order, hon?”

Sally had already been the best liar he’d ever seen even before she went into politics, so the smile she turned on the waitress was flawless. “It all looks sogood, but I already ate at the office.” She pushed the menu, unopened, to the side of the table with one perfect fingernail. “Could I just get a skinny latte?”

“The Moe Howard Mocha’s good,” the waitress offered, probably swayed by the pretty smile that even Sally couldn’t keep completely steady in the face of celebrity-themed coffee names.

“Sure,” she said gamely. “Thank you so much.”

“More ice water for me, thanks.” As the waitress turned away he caught a look pass between her and Sally that seemed pitying, a little sad. “What was that for?”

“It’s the middle of the day. You’re not at work. You’re drinking water in a place people only go for the cheap beer. She thinks I’m your sponsor.”

Tony snorted. Right. “Give her a Vote Sitwell button. You’re trying to get the bleeding-hearts, right?”

“The whole point of this place is not running into anybody who knows me. God, I hope nobody saw me coming in.” Her eyes flicked around the restaurant, at the sparse crowd slumped over their platters in ones and mostly silent twos, and she saved her most disapproving look for Tony himself. “Although I guess maybe I can claim you’re from my Hands Against Homelessness project.”

So he’d let his goatee grow out a little lately. So he’d been too been distracted to do all his usual hair stuff, and he’d spent the past three days running on not much except nervous energy and nicotine. A friend, even the formerly-with-benefits kind, would have pretended not to notice.

They’d never really been friends, though, so Sally added, “Seriously, Tony, you look like crap,” just in case he hadn’t gotten it. “What’s going on with you? Tell me this is at least the glamorous kind of drug addiction you can spin into good PR.”

“Yeah, I’m actually going through some stuff right now,” he snapped – because seriously, screw her, he’d ‘looked like crap’ maybe five times in his entire life, and was it his fault that his awkward late-teens had happened to coincide with the worst of the Eighties? “We can’t all be…” He gestured at her hair, twisted up in a new elaborate braid but still shiny and immaculate in that way of hers that always made him think of the hairdressing girl-toy his twin sister had wanted for their ninth birthday. “Whatever this is. This _Don’t Cry For Me Argentina_ look you’ve got going here.”

“Hair, musicals and Madonna in one bitchy reference.” Her perfect eyebrows lifted. “I love it. Try to work that in next time you get a female interviewer.”

He was not having the ‘a knowledge of musical theater implies nothing about a man’s sexuality’ argument again. He still believed that, he really did, but it was less than six hours since he’d jerked off in a motel shower to the memory of his boyfriend splayed half-naked on a prop cross, and that had to lose you cred as poster-boy for heterosexual appreciation of the arts.

Sally’s mocha came with a chocolate-syrup squiggle on the foam that he guessed was meant to be the Three Stooges, and his pitcher with a quietly sympathetic “Good for you, sweetie.” Sally didn’t even try to hide her smirk.

“To hell with all of you because I look amazing,” he told her, pouring himself a glass. “It’s not a big deal. I flew out for my dad’s birthday, decided to drive back. Listen, anybody not me would look way worse than this after a week in a rental car.”

“You drove all the way from Minnesota?”

“Yeah, very fu...” He blinked. Her expression was a little impatient, a little condescending, but not in the least bit kidding. “What? I’m from Long Island. Where’d you get Minnesota? Because it sure as hell wasn’t from my accent. Or my height. Wait, is it how I’m really fucking nice all the time?”

She shrugged. “Maybe I’m thinking of some other magician.”

“Why, how many magicians are you pay-rolling?”

“None right now.” She stirred precise circles in her coffee, Stooges melting eerily into nothing. “I got burned this one time on what some idiot convinced me would be a smart investment. Soured me on the whole magic thing.”

Dumb. Stupid Tony, dumb. He held his hands out, trying to calm this thing down before she walked out. “Whoa, come on, I’m sorry. It’s still a smart investment, okay? I had a bad couple of y... months, there but it’s, it’s gonna be fine. That’s why I wanted to see you, check in, make sure that – we’re good, right? Are we good?”

“You owe me a hundred grand. Plus five years’ interest,” she said, like he might have forgotten in the last two months, but he relaxed a little. If she was explaining things he already knew she wasn’t really mad. It was when she got quiet that you needed to worry.

“I know, and you’ll get it, but it’ll take time.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“This time’s different,” he said, aware that he’d said that before, too. “I mean, with Lucille Austero...” Missing? Dead? Gob and a weirdly hot security camera tape had filled in some of the blanks from the day he’d lost, but he’d never asked Sally if they’d seen each other on Cinco. If he asked, she might tell him. “The pressure’s off, is all I’m saying.”

“Well, obviously we’re all still hoping she’ll be found.”

“Yeah, of course, yeah,” he said, faking an interest in the menu to avoid looking too closely at Sally’s expression, because if she was lying about this he didn’t ever, ever want to know. “Could you eat? I could eat. The Kevin Bacon Double-Cheeseburger actually looks pretty amazing. And the least kosher thing ever, obviously, but disappointing my family with my life-choices is my theme for the month.”

“That does look amazing, but I really do have that state fair thing. And after that my schedule’s pretty full of not dying from a huge coronary at forty-five.”

His birthday was in a month. Fif... forty was getting closer all the time. He put the menu back. “Point taken.”

“Anyway,” Sally said, “even if Lucille’s gone for good – God forbid – I need the money for my campaign.”

“That’s fine. Sure. I get that. Give me a few months. I’m reworking the act, and I think there’s gonna be some good press soon, maybe a lot, and I’m starting to feel good about the work again. For the first time in years, actually. I don’t know, maybe the magic’s back.”

She sipped her coffee in silence for so long that he thought she’d zoned out until she said, “Sorry, that seemed like you were going to do one of your little tricks. Or were you waiting for...” She rolled her eyes. “Wow, Tony! I wonder what your new act’s going to be?”

Dammit, people never did that when you actually had something ready to go. “No, no trick. I didn’t have any of my stuff with me. Didn’t expect to be gone so long.” He snapped his cuffs towards her. “See? Nothing up my sleeves.”

“Well, _that_ must be a scary new experience for you,” she said.

And the thing was, he knew she was being sarcastic – she’d never had a ton of patience for finding plastic pouches taped under his shirt, or unexpected cascades of pennies or playing cards, and that one time with the dove she’d been furious – but for a second it felt profound, like she’d really got something he’d been trying to put into words for weeks.

“Yeah,” he said. “It is. It’s honestly scaring the shit out of me.” When he was uptight, when he was anxious, his hands didn’t always feel under his control and now they were making slow little circles around each other, like he could wind the words out of his own mouth.

Sally had been making a big pointed show of sneaking glances at her watch, but now he had her full attention. He didn’t like it. “What’s going on, Tony, seriously? You’re out in public looking like... that, and you sound like you’ve had some kind of, I don’t know, come-to-Jesus moment.”

“Should’ve seen me in the shower earlier,” he muttered into his glass.

“What?”

“It’s not that,” he said out loud. “I haven’t found religion, I’m not on meth, and _once again_ , shut up, I look great. I’m…” And he was going to say ‘tired of lying to people’, or maybe just ‘done’, but what came tumbling out of his mouth was, “I’m in love.”

So.

Just putting _that_ out there into the universe.

It felt like a week of chain-smoking and truck-stop coffee hit him at once. His throat was burning, and he tossed back the rest of the water in one long swallow and poured himself another, holding up a finger to Sally – _give me a minute_.

She gave him two, but her voice, when she finally spoke, was edged with ice. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. So that’s what the freak-out’s about? You’ve met some woman, lost your _fucking_ mind and decided to just... go public as straight? Because I’m telling you right now, Tony, you won’t come back from this. You’ll be lucky to make a living on pretty princess parties and magic-geek Bar Mitzvahs.”

Maybe there was some other Tony Wonder in a parallel universe, miserable in a pleather booth like this one, about to throw his career, his life, everything away for love. He couldn’t decide if that would’ve been worse. He couldn’t imagine being in love with some woman – Sally herself, maybe, or one of his exes. That girl who’d had his kid. If he really tried to picture this woman alt-Tony was crazy for, he got a fuzzy image of Gob in a minidress.

Which, being totally honest, he thought could kind of work for him.

And speaking of things he wasn’t proud of – some little part of him was sitting back in satisfaction at the thunderous look on Sally’s face because he’d known, he’d always just _known_ that she wasn’t as casual about him as she pretended. Could he blame her? And he sucked at letting people down gently – much easier to tell a clever lie or hide somewhere quiet till they gave up looking – but he and Sally had a history, six years of it, so he tried.

“Hey, I didn’t plan for any of this,” he said. “Don’t think it’s anything to do with, you know, us.”

“What ‘us’? What are you even talking about?”

Denial was so sad.

“I’m just saying it’s going to be fine, okay?” He pushed his hands back through his hair, and conceded when the soft springiness between his fingers seemed to go on forever in all directions that maybe she had a tiny point about how he looked today. “It’s not gonna ruin the show. It could actually be amazing, if I play it right. If this... person is on board with that.” He braced himself. “I still need to talk it all out with - with him.”

The tension vanished from Sally’s face. “Oh, this is just a sexuality crisis? It’s a guy? I _knew_...” Whatever the hell that was going to be, she smothered it with a fake-sounding cough. “I knew, uh, you’d been having a rough time lately. It makes sense now.”

“Nice save,” he muttered.

“But this is great, Tony,” she said. “This is perfect for you. That website that was sniffing around, implying your whole career was based on lying to your fans? Well, you’ve got proof you’re not lying. Never were, as far as anybody can prove. Really, you should sue.”

“I should. I should sue. Obviously I won’t, because I don’t care and I don’t even remember what they wrote. But, y’know, I’ve got a hot amazing boyfriend, so who’s a cynical band-wagoning fauxmosexual now?”

“Not Tony Wonder, anyway,” Sally agreed, looking happier than he’d ever seen her. “God, this is so – who is he? When did this even happen? Last time I saw you, you were fake-dating Gob... Bluth...”

He didn’t say it. He didn’t have to.

Turned out he’d been wrong before. _This_ was the happiest he’d ever seen her. He waved the waitress away – “She’s fine, she just... heard something funny, I guess,” – and waited until Sally had subsided to just sporadic giggles into her coffee cup.

It took a while.

“Shouldn’t you go? You don’t want to be late for your stupid fair.”

“They’ll wait for me. And if they don’t, who cares. This is so precious.” She settled back in her chair, dabbing her eyes. “Just give me a minute.”

“Right,” he said, relieved, “because you’ve known me for years and there’s no way you ever saw something like this coming so it makes sense you’d need time to process.”

Sally looked at him for a long moment and then reached across the table to pat his arm. “That’s exactly what I meant, Tony, thank you. Of course it is. I had no idea. Even that time when you admitted you’d blown a couple of guys over the years so your act would be more convincing, I knew you weren’t repressing anything or lying to yourself.”

He stared hard at her face, studying the wide eyes and the expression of such gentle, sincere sympathy that he almost forgot she wasn’t really his friend, and decided he’d take it. “All right. Thank you for your understanding.”

Sally shrugged. “I’m an understanding person,” she said modestly, and wow, she really did have this flawless-lies thing down to a science. It was a shame she had to ruin it by blurting out, “Oh. Oh, my God, you’re a Bond girl. I literally just got that.”

“I’m not a _Bond girl_ , what does that even mean?”

“You know.” She gestured impatiently. “The glamorous enemy agent who’s supposed to seduce double-oh-seven but falls in true love and switches sides.”

“That’s not... it wasn’t like that, I... what’s with that, ‘true love’?” He mimicked her air-quotes – which, not for nothing, he’d never once seen her use before he started doing them.

“Oh, that’s not the line you’re taking on this? What are you going with; rivalry turned to something more, jealousy became unbearable sexual tension, blah blah blah? Happy to call in a blind item to the _Poof_ gossip column, if you didn’t do it yourself already.”

“That’s the tackiest thing I’ve ever heard,” Tony told her, choosing not to add that it was also redundant, since he and Gob had been emailing in one weekly anonymous tip-off each since their second real date and those jealous _Poof_ assholes hadn’t printed a single one. “And we’re not ‘taking a line’ on it, don’t call it that.”

“I’m just saying you need to think about how you play this, because a bona fide gay relationship really could be career gold for you. You can’t buy that kind of publicity.” She said this like it was news to him, even though she’d been the one carefully vetting candidates the couple of times he’d tried exactly that. For an attractive, successful magician, hot young guys were surprisingly unwilling to be paid to pretend to date him. “Of course,” she added, making a face, “it’s too bad it had to be Gob, but nothing’s ever perfect.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Maybe I should have cleared it with you first. Made sure I had everything in from the focus groups and key demographics before I fell in love with him, is that what you would have done?”

“Yes,” Sally said, no hesitation. “And three months ago, it’s what you would have done, too.”

“This,” he told her, jabbing one finger onto the table for emphasis, “if you’re wondering – ha – and you pretend you’re not but I know you are; this, right here, is why you’re single.”

“I’m single because my standards are high.” She sniffed. “I mean, I could be with, let’s just take a totally random example, Michael Bluth, but it’s just that I think I can do a little better than someone whose entire family acts like the prison has a revolving door out front.”

Tony glared at her stupid shiny hair and her stupid tiny mouth and told himself that he hadn’t even _met_ Gob’s family – not really, not since they started dating – and getting offended on their behalf was insane. Plus, from everything Gob had said himself, they deserved every bit of their reputation, and then some. It wasn’t like she was insulting Gob hims...

“And come on, I’ve known Gob Bluth since I was eight years old, I think I’m allowed to be a little surprised that you’d fall for him. Although, sure, he’s... charming, I guess. In his own way. If you ignore every single other thing about him.”

“You don’t know him,” Tony said, very quietly. He flexed his fingers, wishing he had a cigarette or a coin trick or something to occupy his hands. “Going to the same high school, dating one of his brothers for five minutes, that doesn’t mean you know who he is.”

Sally had had a knowing smile on her face – not laughing at him, exactly. More like they were sharing a private joke against somebody else. Now it dropped. “Well, I know he got at least three girls in my senior year pregnant,” she said. “And that when he was thirteen he almost got banned from the country club for setting a golf cart on fire and then pushing it into the lake to hide the evidence. His father had to pay to reseed the tennis court to make _that_ little escapadego away.”

Country club, God. Not for the first time, he considered that this thing he was going through might not even be about gay or straight or bi so much as an overwhelming, non-gender-specific attraction to preppy WASP assholes. “High school bullshit. Who cares.”

“That’s not even getting into ditching some poor girl at the altar, or the magic career.” She didn’t make the quotes around that last word, but he heard them anyway.

“Just – he’s more than that, okay? More than his stupid family or whatever. I don’t know, I can’t explain it.” That wasn’t true, but if he tried right now, stressed out and wired, he was in danger of going full Harlequin, all _same_ and _special_ and _perfect_ and, God help him, _soulmates_.

And really, if he was going to make that big an idiot of himself, Gob deserved to be there to hear it.

“Look at you, defending his honor,” Sally said, brushing away an imaginary tear. “Magicians in love. It’s adorable, really. You weren’t wrong about this being big press for the show, especially if you do a double act.”

There was a tiny chance he’d oversold that, considering how hard Gob had been dragging his feet on the whole going-public thing the last time they’d spoken. “Like I said, we’re still working out the details,” he said quickly, suddenly imagining her firing off press releases the second she was out of his sight. “I know you’ve got the campaign but just give me a few months. You know I’m good for it.”

Finally, Sally nodded. “Three months,” she said. “But I want ten percent of your take until I’m paid back.”

“Five.”

“Seven and a half.” She smiled. “And I get invited to the wedding, good seats, near your families, something in view of the cameras.”

“You assume I’d have cameras at my own wedding.” He shook his head, caught himself: “Which. Fuck. We’re not getting married. That’s not even a question.”

“Of course you’d have cameras. You’re in love, you’re not an idiot. A magician wedding is going to be great anyway – what would what even look like? Because I’m just imagining wall-to-wall doves – but if you play the former-religious-fundamentalist angle, that’s bigger than just _Poof_. Not just the gay press, either, this is... okay, not _People_ , let’s not go crazy, but _Star_ , for sure. Maybe even a cover, if they ditch _Babies Having Babies_ for a week.” He could see the PR-machine wheels start to turn in her head, that seven-and-a-half percent multiplying behind her eyes. “You know, I was kidding, but that would actually be great for me. If Lindsay turns up, she’s endorsing gay marriage, and if she doesn’t - ‘My opponent talks a good game about family values but isn’t here today to support her own family’. God, this thing writes itself.”

“The election’s this year, Sal, you think we’re going to get married by then? We’re gay...” and he’d outed himself to an audience five times a week plus matinees for years, so it had to be the ‘we’ part that made that feel so weird, “...we’re not lesbians.”

“You know, you say that, but your hair’s kind of kd lang-looking right now.”

He privately decided he was finished with all women, forever.

“You’ve got a point, though,” Sally said, reaching for her purse. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Get through today without him dumping you and worry about writing your vows later.”

Well, he _had_ been going to offer to pay for her coffee, but she could say goodbye to that. Still, he was close to walking out of here with an okay deal, so he tried to force a smile at the bad joke. “Um, just so you know,” he told her, “I really don’t think _him_ dumping _me_ is going to be a problem. Come on, the guy told me he loved me the first time I remember us having sex.”

“File under things I did not need to know.” She frowned. “And that’s a funny way to phrase it.”

“Doesn’t matter. We’re doing great, okay?”

Sally gave her watch a long, thoughtful look. “Well... I’m already late, but what the hell, I can take another five minutes out of my day to point out how wrong you are. You look like you haven’t slept in days,” she said, adding before Tony could object, “from driving, sure, but you _chose_ to rent a car to get back from New York even though you never shut up about how much you hate to drive. Obviously something happened. I guess, with that crack about disappointing your family, you told your parents about Gob and they didn’t take it well.

“Except,” she jumped in as he was opening his mouth to say _Fine, you got me, go occupy your apparently brilliant mind someplace else_ , “that doesn’t make sense because if I had a big fight with my parents I’d want to rush back home to my going-great relationship with my adoring boyfriend, not take an extra week getting back for no reason. And when you finally do get into town, you call me. Two months of radio silence and you suddenly need to talk this out today, really?”

“He’s at work. He has a whole company to run,” Tony said, and it sounded feeble even to him. Especially to him; he knew, as Sally didn’t, exactly how many times he’d talked Gob into blowing off work to stay in bed or watch him rehearse or just hang out during the day.

“You’re scared to go home,” Sally said, and he’d never understand how somebody who wanted a career in the public eye could be tactful as a rock. “Either you suddenly had second thoughts about the relationship but you realized it’s gone too far to back out now...”

“It’s not that,” he said, so completely sure of it that she just nodded.

“Okay. So you had a fight.”

“World’s greatest fucking detective over here,” he snapped. “You should be helping the police look for Mrs Austero, not wasting time with my problems.”

“Your problems are fun,” she said serenely. “And you’re assuming I don’t know where she is already.”

He stared at her, appalled into sudden silence.

“Joke. Joke, Tony. Jeez, I remember when you had a sense of humor.”

_I remember when I never knew anybody who’d disappeared._

Even rehashing what had happened with Gob was better than the other things he wasn’t thinking about. “We didn’t fight,” he said. “We don’t fight. We’re fine. We’re perfect. We talked this morning. You want to check my phone?”

“Sure, let me see,” she said, hand already stretched across the table to take it before he finished speaking.

Bluff called.

He folded his arms across his chest and wished he hadn’t drunk so much water. It felt heavy and cold inside him. “We haven’t spoken since before I left, okay? So what? Go open your fair. Judge a beauty pageant, churn some butter, whatever the hell you’re supposed to do today.”

That would have worked if Sally was remotely the type to let things go. As it was she just looked back at him from across the table until he snapped.

“It was barely even a fight.”

“There it is.”

“He drove me to the airport last week and we had a disagreement,” he said, stressing the last word and the non-fight-ness of it. “We got to talking about when we were going to go public. Really public, not just the magic community. People who actually matter. Our parents. His brother. I told him I was going to tell my mom and dad about us. I thought he’d be – I don’t know how it escalated into some big thing.” His hands were doing it again. Sally was quick enough to catch the salt shaker before his _big thing_ motion knocked it to the floor. “So I drove back. I figured we could both do with, y’know, some space.”

And he’d had space, thousands of miles of it. Alone in the car for a week, phone turned off in the glove compartment, he’d had all the time he wanted to imagine do-overs for that last conversation. The Gob in his head listened carefully and conceded all of his excellent points about how great the publicity would be for both their careers, and unlike the real one didn’t keep getting hung up on his family or being company President, and definitely didn’t look teary and crushed as Tony shouldered his bag and stormed away without saying goodbye.

Of course, the imaginary Gob was only as sweet and funny as Tony’s imagination could make him, which wasn’t much, and couldn’t surprise him like the real thing did – beautifully, constantly – so after a while he’d stopped winning pretend fights and he’d been all alone with the quiet and the open road.

“I should’ve called him,” he said, more to himself than to her. It was what he’d been trying not to think since that morning, when he’d finally turned on his phone and found that the only voicemails waiting for him were from his dad and his agent. “I went off the map for over a week. As far as he knows, I left town and disappeared. Who does that to somebody?”

“Ugh, get over yourself,” Sally said, dragging him out of the sad-music place he’d been going in his head, and he remembered that their not-relationship had lasted six years largely because of her unshakeable ego and her refusal to indulge his crap. “Not one person in the world, not even a certifiable weirdo like Gob Bluth, is so hot for you that a week without you is going to send him off the deep end. Couples fight. The honeymoon’s over, that’s all. Buy him something expensive and go down on him, this isn’t relationship rocket science.”

“Your longest relationship lasted a month,” he pointed out, even though that seemed like pretty solid advice and actually made him feel a little less shitty. “Not counting me.”

“ _Absolutely_ not counting you, God, never say that again.” She gathered up her purse and dropped a couple of bills onto the table, enough to cover the coffee three times over. “Say hi to Gob. Or his brother, if you ever get to meet him. Either way, see you in three months. Looking forward to your new improved act.”

“Three months,” he agreed, even though he had no idea where he’d be in three _hours_.

“Look at us,” she said, the bright public facade slipping coolly into place as she got up to go. “Meeting for lunch. Chatting about men. It’s like we’re friends.”

“I know I’d hate to be your enemy.” It was as sincere as anything he’d ever said in his life, and he couldn’t get a read on her answering smile at all.

After she’d gone he took out his phone and sat with a blank text open for a long time before he typed _Hey,_ _back in town. Come over later?_ He tried _Sorry_ and then _Love you_ at the end but they didn’t feel right.

“Can I get you anything else?”

He looked up at his pal, the sympathetic waitress, and considered asking her very nicely whether Klimpy’s could find a place for a live-in gay magician. He could sleep in back and eat cheeseburgers and never drive anywhere ever again.

“No, I’m going too.” He sighed, and hit _send_. “Man, having feelings myself was already rough,” he told her. “Caring about another person’s is shaping up to be exhausting.”

“One step at a time, sweetie,” she murmured, tucking the money into her belt. “Just take it one step at a time.”


End file.
